Public service

Head of the civil service directorate of the Institute of Public and Municipal Management of NRU HSE Alexei Konov, a most welcome guest at the studio of Radio Russia, speaks about the declaration of income and expenses by civil servants.
Aleksei KONOV: There have been two substantial attempts to move civil servants to declare their expenses and income. The first was the reform of 1997-98, when two presidential decrees came into force on the procedure for submitting information on income, property and property-based obligations, plus a decree on the verification of this information. The second was the decrees, adopted in 2008-09; there were several decrees on the procedure for providing information and two decrees on verification. And now the third attempt is unfolding before our very eyes - additional reform, or post-reform. This attempt to adopt a law on control over expenses could at last, perhaps, balance the expenses and the income of civil servants, although in itself this is not very likely.

On 13 September the Higher School of Economics presented the report On development of an anti-corruption declaration system in Russia, prepared using research conducted at the HSE Institute of Public and Municipal Management.
Discussion of the report involved representatives of the Presidential Administration, the Government Office, key ministries and departments, the Accounts Chamber, the relevant committees of the State Duma and Federation Council, and expert and business communities.

A seminar on Public and Municipal Management has been held in Krasnoyarsk, as part of the School for Aspiring Public Administrators project to train the region’s management pool.  
Specialist speakers at the event included member of the Federation Council Andrey KLISHAS, director of the Public Service Development Centre of IPAMM NRU HSE Nikolai KLISHCH and professor of the Department for Russian Constitutional and Municipal Law of the Moscow State Law Academy Ekaterina SHUGRINA.

On 3 April, at the academic council of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Anastasia BOZHYA-VOLYA successfully defended her dissertation for the academic degree of candidate in economic sciences on the subject A system to assess and stimulate the performance of public servants.
The dissertation summarised international and domestic experience in assessing the performance of public servants and established a link between various assessment models and the features of the structure of state and politics in different countries.

On 9 April, Andrei KLIMENKO took part in the Open Studio programme on television's Channel 5, devoted to the civil service in Russia. Are all public servants patriots? And what form should this patriotism take? What can we do to raise the level of responsibility of civil servants to the public and force them to utilise budget resources effectively? These are the questions under discussion by the programme’s panel.

Head of the civil service directorate of the Institute of Public and Municipal Management of the NRU HSE Alexei KONOV told Kommersant correspondent Irina GRANIK what is still missing in the Russian system for public servants to declare their income.

Over the last 10 years the number of Russian civil servants across all levels has grown 1.4 times. This data is contained in the final report on adjustment of the long-term strategy until 2020, which has been submitted to the government. There is an excessive number of civil servants in Russia and they hinder economic growth, believe the government report’s compilers, and they are basically something the country can ill afford. The budgets of all levels spend about RUB 67 billion a month on their salaries alone, or RUB 804 billion a year. If their number is reduced to even just the level of the year 2000, annual savings of some RUB 240 billion will be assured. Given the expenditure on premises, transport, communication and so on, these sums could double, believes director of the NRU HSE Institute for Public and Municipal Administration Andrei KLIMENKO.

On 9-10 November in Djakarta, the international forum Bureaucratic Reform: International Forum for Knowledge Management was held, organised by the Indonesian Government with the support of the World Bank.
IPAMM director Andrei KLIMENKO appeared at the conference with the report Reform of the Civil Service in Russia: Key Results and Prospects.